Motivational Quotes

Art

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

- Motherwell, Robert

Best Quotes about Art

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

10.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

11.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

12.

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

13.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

14.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

15.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

16.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

17.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

18.

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

19.

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Mcluhan, Marshall

20.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

21.

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

22.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

23.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

24.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

25.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

26.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

27.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

28.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

29.

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

30.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

31.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

32.

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

33.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

34.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

35.

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

36.

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Pearse, Patrick Henry

37.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

38.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

39.

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.

40.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

41.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

42.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

43.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

44.

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

45.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

46.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

47.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

48.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

49.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

50.

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders